


Terrible People

by Chiomi



Series: Death and Lightning [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Implied Sexual Content, Jossed, Memory Alteration, No Sex, Pre-Canon, Teen Pregnancy, Unplanned Pregnancy, Warning: Kate Argent, canon compliant through 506, this is about baby sociopaths accidentally having a coyote
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-05
Updated: 2015-08-05
Packaged: 2018-04-13 03:41:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4506360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chiomi/pseuds/Chiomi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They send her to boarding school because she’s on the verge of flunking out. She spends most of her time hunting, and her mother thinks it’s excessive, like there aren’t actual monsters on the loose. Her dad argues with her mom over it, but the Argent hierarchy’s super clear about it, so Kate gets packed off to the middle of nowhere. </p><p>There, she meets Peter Hale, and does something like fall in love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Terrible People

**Author's Note:**

> This wouldn't exist without extensive work with Alexis, who is great.
> 
> Thanks also to Tristan for the speedy beta.
> 
> Please let me know if you think it needs more tags, and come find me on [tumblr](http://uswe.tumblr.com/).

They send her to boarding school because she’s on the verge of flunking out. She spends most of her time hunting, and her mother thinks it’s excessive, like there aren’t actual monsters on the loose. Her dad argues with her mom over it, but the Argent hierarchy’s super clear about it, so Kate gets packed off to the middle of nowhere.

The only saving grace, if there is one at all, is that it’s the start of high school so she’s not really the new kid: there are another handful of kids who aren’t graduating up from the middle school. “We’ve got most of you newbies rooming with each other,” says the tour guide, a bored senior with extra stuff under her school crest that probably means that she’s got some kind of trumped up pseudo-authority. “Most people put in their roommate requests last Spring. You have today free until dinner at 6 in the main hall - your package has a map. You need to hand in your signed student conduct sheet then, but you have until Monday to get the roommate agreement done up.”

She’s sharing with an enthusiastic brunette who seems to be mostly eyeliner. She seems nice enough, even if she does take forever to clear out so Kate can hide her weapons.

*

The classes at this school are harder than she’s used to, or maybe it’s just that she’s showing up. French is the worst, probably, partly because she doesn’t see the point. They make her get a tutor, and the first thing she tells him is, “I don’t see the point of French, because everything important’s going to be translated into English. It’s practically a dead language.”

“Sometimes it’s about finding the best words, though, and French offers more options with that, like - ” He says something that’s obviously a quote by intonation, but Kate has no idea what he said, and doesn’t care.

She stares at him, unimpressed. He’s cute, and obviously knows it, but he’s way full of himself. “What do I need to pass this class?”

He rolls his eyes. “That’s boring, but whatever. _Me donner vos devoirs_.”

She understands that much, and shoves the last couple worksheets at him.

He takes one look, and huffs a laugh. “Your family’s French, and you’re having trouble with it?”

“My family’s American. Can you please stick to the topic? I know what she marked wrong and whatever, but none of it makes sense.”

He acts kind of superior, like he’s doling out things she should want, but the whole stupid language makes slightly more sense when they’re done, and they make an appointment for later in the week.

He brings poetry about military victories to their next meeting, and tells her she should work on translating them. It’s dumb, and cuts into her non-homework time, but her days are way freer than they were before anyway, with nothing to hunt and nowhere to practice with a gun. Plus her roommate already thinks she’s weird for how much she works out, and she’s not even in the Tae Kwon Do class to see how Kate tends to respond with what’s most effective, not necessarily what’s on form.

She learns that Peter doesn’t have a girlfriend completely by accident, because there are girls in the room talking about boys they think are cute. It’s not like she was digging. She aggressively doesn’t care, because he’s just the jerk helping her with her French grade. He’s dumb, and it’s dumb that he wears cologne, because it’s all distracting and stupid and you have to be way too close to him to notice it anyway, so what purpose does it even serve anyway?

The classes that aren’t French are fine, mostly. She’d have the top grade in her class in P.E. if the teacher didn’t think she was a ‘bad sportsman’ or whatever. It’s like, okay, she’s used to the real world, where losing means someone gets maimed or she has to walk home from the training site way out of town. But it’s not like she’s dumb. She’s never been dumb, she just had better things to do. Now, even when she runs in the woods around the school after dark, nothing happens. The squirrels are the biggest threat that’s not her.

She slows to a walk as she approaches the door closest to her room, and does her cool-down stretches out there on the lawn. It’s a nice night, waxing moon already high in the sky. She’s getting taller, some kind of growth spurt that means the hems of her jeans don’t touch the ground anymore, but her body’s still her own, and strong. Her mom was being gross and unobservant about the changes Kate’s going through. Nothing about Kate is out of control.

When she gets back up to her room, there’s another girl there, one of the ones who’s been there since kindergarten or whatever. Their conversation falls silent as Kate comes in. The other girl pulls on an effortful smile. “Hey.”

Kate just strips off her tank top and throws it in the laundry basket.

“Uh, so, a bunch of us are going in to town this weekend. Want to come with?”

“Sure, whatever,” she says, casual as all get out. It’s not like she has anything better to do than spend time with teenagers, with no hunting to do. She wouldn’t care at all if she had something to do. It’s not like she cares what they think.

She can almost hear them looking at each other as she strips off her bra and puts on her robe. Ugh, she’s a project or something. Whatever. She’s better than them, she has purpose. She flips her hair out from the neck of the robe dramatically before taking off her pants and grabbing her shower caddy and leaving the room.

She ends up going into town on Saturday even though it’s some stupid thing where the girl - Maggie or something? - wants to, like, adopt Kate and make her fit in better. She wears her raggediest shortalls and a bright blue shirt and she looks super great and doesn’t fit in with any of the other girls at all.

There’s a shuttle, which is kind of dumb but makes sense since no one’s allowed a car until they’re a senior. They all have to sign a little list that they’re going in to town and then the bus driver reads out the times they’ll be able to catch the shuttle back. It’s like a field trip.

She spots Peter in an alley. It’s not like she keeps an eye out for him or anything, she’s just highly attuned to sketchy behavior, and he’s passing someone cash for - for a box of cigarettes, apparently. Which is weird, because he’s never smelled like cigarettes before. Not that she pays attention. She doesn’t care. She has, like, negative caring about Peter, which is why it’s almost a surprise to find she’s crossed the street to lurk outside the alley and fall into step with him as he saunters out. “How do you even plan to sneak them back into the school? They’re threatening to check all our shopping bags when we get back on the bus.”

He winks at her, and _augh_. She hates when people wink at her, and this feels all conspiratorial and shivery. “I’ve got ways. Want to get ice cream?”

Kate spots the girl who wanted to make her a project, and the girl’s glaring at her. “Sure,” she says, and loops her arm through Peter’s.

He raises an eyebrow at her, then seems to spot the group of other girls, because he smirks and tucks his arm - and Kate by extension - closer to his side. He leads her to a place that’s all outdated diner whatever, with red booths and a jukebox that looks straight out of the 60s. They’ve got the menu on the walls, including some kind of monster sundae that sounds like too much of a challenge to pass up.

“Want to split the Mount Chocolate?”

She narrows her eyes at him. “Okay, but I get the cherry.”

“Anything you want,” he says easily.

She narrows her eyes at him even more, because he’s being really easygoing and it seems too easy, but he’s smiling at her like giving her what she wants makes him happy. She orders when the waiter comes.

The sundae is delicious, scoops of chocolate and mint chocolate and rocky road and chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, fruit and fudge and mountains of whipped cream on top. Kate pops the cherry in her mouth before Peter can forget that he agreed that she could have it.

They make good progress before Kate starts feeling like her stomach’s going to explode and she has to put down her spoon.

“You’ve got a little something,” Peter says, gesturing vaguely at her face.

Kate licks around her mouth, picking up remains of chocolate. “Better?”

“No, here, let me,” he says, and reaches over. His thumb brushes her cheek and the corner of her mouth, and Kate’s blushing all over suddenly. Peter’s blushing, too, high on his cheeks, as he sits back and wipes his thumb on a napkin. He clears his throat, but his voice still comes out a little strained. “There, all gone.”

Kate clears her throat and mutters, “Thanks.”

She doesn’t spend the whole rest of the afternoon with him, but it’s still - it’s nice, or something. He’s not all bad, when he’s not yammering about French.

Kate buys another sports bra, because it’s something to do, but she’s not much interested in anything else. Nothing anyone else is looking at is even cool, all matching skirts and blazers. The skirts are too restrictive to even run in, which is stupid. Kate is sort of dimly aware that they’re dressing from some big movie that came out over the summer. She hadn’t seen it. She doesn’t really see movies, because her mom thinks they’ll rot her brain and her dad thinks they’ll distract her from real work.

When the shuttle’s pulling in to where she’s waiting - the second-to-last one of the day - Peter sort of appears beside her. Kate jumps, because she hadn’t heard or seen him at all. He smiles at her like they’ve got some kind of shared secret, and slides her the cigarettes she’d seen him buy earlier. “Here, hide these in your stuff.”

It’s not like she’s not used to smuggling stuff - she’s never without a knife, even though they’re banned on campus. But Peter’s annoyingly arrogant. Still, kicking up a fuss would be unwanted attention, and it’s not that big a deal. So Kate shrugs and nudges her bag closed.

Peter sits next to her on the ride back, even though there are plenty of seats. One of the other girls on her floor glares at her in passing, and Kate smirks. Even if Peter’s kind of a weird jerk sometimes, he’s a weird jerk other girls think is cute, and Kate likes when people are jealous of her. And, okay, Peter not might be a total weird jerk. He carries her bag in for her, and part of her thinks he might have done it even if she weren’t smuggling his cigarettes. “Can I go running with you tomorrow?”

“Um, yeah,” she’s saying before she can really think about it. “How’d you know I run?”

“I pay attention,” he says, smirking, and runs his hand down her arm before he walks away.

She doesn’t try to find him before her run, but there’s a little thrill in her that he might come looking. Kate knows all about the hunt, and she knows enough to know that men and women are just another kind of hunt.

Peter pops up when she’s a few minutes into her run, just sort of appearing from between the trees. Kate shies off the path and reaches for her knife before she recognizes him. “Oh my God, Peter, you scared me!”

He grins at her. “So are we doing this or not?”

She grins back at him, one of the first happy smiles since she arrived at this stupid school, and sets off at a dead run.

She manages to keep ahead of him for most of the run, but he catches up once they’re out of the woods and runs next to her. Kate puts on an extra burst of speed at the end and tags the wall next to the door just before he reaches it and stops, panting. She laughs, and leans back against the cool brick.

Peter’s still smiling at her, breathing hard. His shirt’s got damp spots on the chest and under the arms that are actually kind of gross, but his smile is nice and his eyes are really intent on her face. He sways in, and kisses her.

Kate shoves him away, and he has the gall to just raise his eyebrows at her and pretend he’s some kind of smooth, the jerk. “Hey, I didn’t say you could do that.”

Peter leans his forearm next to her head, and she could totally hit him in the side and put him down, but she’s - whatever, she can do that whenever. “Yeah? Then can I kiss you?”

“Mm,” she says. “Run faster than me tomorrow, and sure.”

The jerk manages to beat her the next day, but she doesn’t totally mind, she guesses. He kisses nice, anyway, better than the only other guy she’s kissed. “So,” he says when he pulls away. “Does that mean that if you win tomorrow you get to kiss me instead?”

“Maybe,” Kate says, lips buzzing. “I’ll let you know tomorrow when I kick your ass.”

He just grins at her. “Don’t forget tutoring tomorrow, too.”

Kate scrunches her nose at him. “Hard to forget.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Peter says, and turns to walk away.

“You shouldn’t! French sucks,” Kate yells after him. All she gets in response is a wave.

*

Kate ends up deciding that the winner getting to instigate the kissing is a pretty good policy. She likes kissing Peter. He’s cool. On Friday, after she kisses him, Kate pulls away and says, “I run farther on weekends. If you manage to beat me tomorrow, you can touch my boob.” Her skin feels itchy and on fire, and she has no problem slowing down the last few steps if it means she gets to win like a full-grown woman.

Peter grins wickedly and grabs her face to pull her into another kiss. Which isn’t something they’ve agreed on! But it feels really nice, so Kate kisses him back for a while.

*

Snow on the ground makes it hard to run in the woods, and there’s no way Kate and Peter are trading kisses for victories in the gym. So they do stuff like watch movies in the common room on one or the other of their floors. There aren’t any rules about closed doors on the common room, but all the same no one goes in them during the weekend afternoons, usually, because there’s nothing good on the TV, so the two of them can sit in there and make out.

But Kate’s not good with half-measures: her first mission had been a capture, and she’d made it a kill, because she likes to finish the job. So the next time her roommate’s planning to go into town to dither all day about Christmas gifts, she lets Peter know that he should come over and study. It’s a crisp winter day outside, and the sun shines bright through the window as Kate breaks the rules and locks the door behind him. She pulls off her sweater and throws it on her laundry basket and turns to him in just her bra and jeans. “We should totally have sex.”

*

Kate goes home for Christmas break feeling smug and sleek. She’s got her very own secrets now in a family full of them, and she’s a woman now despite her mom trying to keep her a kid all sheltered from hunting and the real world.

She plays with Allison and gets a crossbow for Christmas from her dad and clothes from her mom and eats herself sick on turkey. Seriously sick - she gets, like, food poisoning from it or the leftovers, ‘cause she pukes a couple of mornings before the New Year. Whatever, she gets over it, and stays up until midnight to see the ball drop on the TV. There’s nothing to hunt, but it’s still a good vacation, and Kate goes back to school feeling pretty okay.

*

“Ugh, my cramps are so bad. Do you have any chocolate?””

“Nope. Hey, Kate, you got anything?”

Kate doesn’t even bother looking up from her stuff. They’re weak, letting their bodies dictate stuff to them.

“Don’t bother,” Kate’s roommate says. “Lucky bitch barely gets a period.”

Kate scrunches her eyebrows together. That’s not true - she started like a year ago and it’s been - nope. She started a year and a half ago, and hasn’t had a period in three months. Fuck. You’re not supposed to be able to get pregnant your first time! That’s, like, illegal. And she hasn’t gotten fat, and they’ve used a condom since. She’s just - not getting her period. It’s probably her body just refusing flat out to be like the idiots she lives with. It’s fine.

All the same, she steals a pregnancy test the next time they’re in town.

*

Okay. So she’s pregnant. That’s - she’s only 14. She’s 14. She’s not even supposed to be worrying about Prom for another couple years.

Kate buries her head in her hands, nearly getting the pee-stained stick in her hair. Okay, but they can be wrong. They can totally be wrong - there’s a nurse at school - no, she’d be able to contact parents. Planned Parenthood! There’s a Planned Parenthood in town, and they can either tell her the test was wrong or take care of the whole thing and make it go away. And there’s a bus to town tomorrow, too. She can just go then.

Kate carefully burns the evidence, dropping the trash in the toilet, then wraps herself super tight in her blanket and tries to go to sleep. She kind of wishes Peter were there to cuddle her, but that’s stupid, just as stupid as wishing for her mom or Chris or Victoria.

In the morning, she takes the first bus in, then slips away from the group. No one else needs to fucking know. They’re open Sundays, thank God, and they take walk-ins. There’s a doctor who’d be pretty if she weren’t so old, and she makes Kate pee in a cup again. Then she - she says Kate is pregnant.

“Okay, but you can - I don’t want to be pregnant.”

The doctor pats Kate on the hand. “I understand, honey. Do you want to call your parents?”

“No! I just don’t want to be pregnant. Make it stop. You can abort it, right?”

The doctor hesitates, and it makes Kate want to shoot her. “We need to do another test before I can tell you that, sweetie.”

“Fine,” Kate snaps. “Do it.”

Then she puts up with getting gross cold jelly on her stomach and the doctor treating her like she’s fragile or whatever. Kate’s not fragile, Kate’s just going to murder Peter for knocking her up, unless this can be taken care of and just go away.

“Oh, honey,” the doctor says, her voice all gentle and smothering. “I’m afraid you’re about four months along.”

“What? What does that mean?”

“We can’t - fifteen weeks is the cutoff. You do have options, though. We can call your parents, and talk about -”

Kate’s stopped listening, is just walking out with her loose T-shirt catching and sticking to the gross jelly on her stomach. When she’s outside, she breaks into a run, because they might come after her.

She doesn’t stop running until she’s something like a mile away, and then she has to stop because she’s shaking. It’s stupid and weak and pathetic and she can’t make it stop. She ends up walking back to the bus stop all disheveled and gross, but she’s just going back, going to shower all of this away, so whatever.

When she gets back, she showers and puts on clean clothes that don’t smell like panic and goes over to Peter’s dorm. Someone has to freak out with her so that she can get over it and figure out what to do, and he’s pretty clever - he might be able to help he figure out a way out of this. He better, anyway, since it’s his fault.

Peter opens the door already smiling. “Hey, Katie.”

“I’m pregnant,” she blurts.

He steps back and his eyes widen and flare gold all at the same time. His hand on the door grows claws, and Kate just - Kate bolts.

She slams her door and leans against it, cursing herself for being an idiot. He’s a werewolf. Of course he’s a werewolf. She slams the door back open and runs to the bathroom to puke. She pukes up everything in her stomach, since apparently pregnancy and horror make for an awesome pukey combo. How could she have been so stupid? God, she’d let an animal put its hands all over her. There are words for that, gross words, and she -

None of this is okay.

When she has nothing left to puke up, Kate swipes her sleeve across her face to take off the worst of the tears and snot and goes to pack a bag. Animals get territorial about their cubs, and she can’t -

Kate packs a bag as fast as she can, and leaves before her roommate can get back or Peter can get over his freakout and risk other people seeing him to come find her. She just barely catches a shuttle to town, sees Peter coming out of the dorm as they’re pulling away, and sighs in relief. It’ll take him longer to get to town than her, even with werewolf speed, and the Greyhound station isn’t far from the bus stop. Peter won’t be able to track her scent with all the other people in the station and with buses headed both north and south. Kate jumps on the one that’s leaving soonest, and hopes to Hell she’s got enough of a head start.

*

Talia picks up the phone to Peter in a blind panic, and pretty much rolls her eyes. She’s got a seven year old, a six year old, and another on the way, and her life is still much less dramatic and messy than his. “My girlfriend’s pregnant,” he blurts out.

“Oh my _God_ ,” Talia says, as much judgement as possible crammed into her voice. Laura and Derek are coloring in the kitchen, and so would hear if she really tore into him, but really. He’s 15! He shouldn’t even be making out with anyone.

“She’s Kate Argent.”

“Peter.”

“And she found out I’m a werewolf.”

“ _Peter_.”

“And then she disappeared.”

“You’re grounded until forever.” She’s already trying to plan her way out of this, to make it less of a catastrophe. Argents will be gunning for all of them if they find out - they’ve got a thing, where they make any of their own who get bitten kill themselves, and how much worse will it be if it’s a young girl, not turned but pregnant with what they’ll see as a monster. Teen pregnancy on its own is enraging for most families, but like this the Argents will be gunning for all of them. Plus Peter will be driven to be involved, somehow, will have a near-impossible time letting go. Familial urges are strong in werewolves, even for idiot hormonal teenagers. Talia’s going to have to dance very fast and very sure to avoid there being any fallout. “I’ll look into things. You keep going to school - you’ll be home for Spring Break and I’ll have news then, if not before. I’ll take care of this.”

She hangs up before she can threaten to cut his balls off because he’s an idiot, and starts making notes on the pad next to the phone. There’s a lot to take care of so that when Peter comes home taking all his memories of the girl will end this episode completely.

*

She sets up a private adoption so they’ll pay for her medical bills. She’s pretty and white and says she’s going to go to college, so there’s a whole agency that’s super overjoyed to hook her up with a software developer and her husband who desperately want kids.

Her parents can’t know. Like, it’s not okay at all. They’ll kill her or kick her out of the family or find something inventively worse. So she doesn’t use her own name on the paperwork - uses Peter’s, but not hers, so that anyone who gets suspicious if she ends up a werewolf can dump her on the right pack. She ends up staying in Minneapolis for the duration - it’s a packless city, because no creature in their right mind wants to live this far north where it’s still frigid in springtime. At least it’s safe, and has clean hospitals. Kate waddles around the awful city until she’s fit to burst; her water breaks in the Mall of America.

The next fourteen hours are the worst she’s ever lived through - worse than testing, worse than that time she broke her arm. It’s not just the pain - pain she can deal with. It’s that she shits herself, that people are staring at her junk and she can see the doctors and nurses judging her for being so young. The only person who doesn’t look judgey is the nurse she’s been dealing with for months, and that’s probably just because she’s already done all the judging she can muster. Kate snarls at all of them and turns down drugs, because she knows they’ll whisper about her being some teenager druggie, and fuck them, she’s not going to let them. She screams through it, screams out the rage and humiliation of this stupid, stupid mistake, and eventually it pops out of her, a wrinkled and slimy thing.

“Give me the paperwork,” is the first thing she rasps when she’s stopped screaming. She wants this done, the kid gone to its parents, so she can go back to being a hunter instead of a stupid little girl.

They let her sign away the kid, but then they make her stay a whole day until they think she’s recovered. Kate tucks the painkillers they give her away in her duffle bag to save for when she’s had an injury and earned the relief and then hands the duffle to the cab driver taking her to the bus station. She’s going far away. Her family could still track her here to Minnesota, so she’s going as far away as she can until she’s a real hunter again and until they can’t make her go back to school.

The bus takes her all the way to Tucson, where an empty safe house and a family contact provide her with the guns and cash and ID and car she needs to disappear into the desert.

*

They call her the Desert Wolf, the ones she leaves alive to tell stories. There aren’t a lot of them. Kate likes it that way, likes that her hair gets sun-bleached to the color of the desert, likes the pure clean fury of ridding the world of monsters.

She sends postcards back for Allison, at least one a week, from all over the Southwest. They’ll know she’s alive, but not know how to trace her, which suits her right down to the ground. They won’t even be able to track her through the hunter networks, because she meets up with amateurs with no idea who the Argents are when she needs more muscle and teaches them to respect a name that wasn’t the one she’d been born with.

By the time she gets back in touch with her parents, even her mom’s vaguely proud of who she’s become.

*

Laura’s shaking and sick with power, huddled in the back of the animal clinic. “I can’t - we can’t be here. Everything smells like death, and I have no idea -”

"Go,” Deaton says. “There's enough Hale blood on the ground that you won't lose your claim."

They go, lost children with no other recourse. At the next full moon, they howl and howl and howl their grief, and the shift is barely controlled. Three states away, a child who’s never heard of pack looks at the moon reflected in a spill of blood and loses herself completely.


End file.
